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The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born.
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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The penalty for success is to be bored by people who used to snub you.
-Nancy Astor
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In order to live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.
-Richard Bach
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I have a fear of being boring.
-Christian Bale
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Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.
-Jean Baudrillard
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Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
-Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
-Walter Benjamin
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Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?
-John Berger
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The world is eaten up by boredom. You can't see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice, you breathe it in, you eat and drink it. It is sifted so fine, it doesn't even grit on your teeth. But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and hands. To shake off this drizzle of ashes you must be for ever on the go. And so people are always on the go.
-Georges Bernanos
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Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatedly) Ever to confess you're bored means you have no inner Resources. I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
-John Berryman
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Bore -- a person who talks when you wish him to listen.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.
-Lady Bloomfield
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Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The things to avoid is being a bore to oneself.
-Gerald Brenan
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One thing I can say about George... he may not be able to keep a job, but he's not boring.
-Barbara Bush
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What's wrong with being a boring kind of guy?
-George Bush
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Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.
-Samuel Butler
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The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.
-Samuel Butler
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Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.
-Dale Carnegie
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Living, just by itself --what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you...
-Louis-Ferdinand Celine, The narrator (Ferdinand Bardamu), in Journey to the End of the Night (tr. 1934; 1966 ed., p. 307), 1932
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There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic.
-G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
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A yawn is a silent shout.
-G. K. Chesterton
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A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit.
-Ivan Chtcheglov
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People who have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company.
-Jeremy Collier
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Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.
-Guy Debord
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I spent a year in that town, one Sunday.
-Warwick Deeping
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I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.
-Charles Dickens
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The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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Life is never boring, but some people choose to be bored.
-Wayne Dyer
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The concept of boredom entails an inability to use up present moments in a personally fulfilling way.
-Wayne Dyer
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Boredom is not an end product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
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A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.
-Henry Ford
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No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
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There are moments when, faced with our lack of success, I wonder whether we are failures, proud but impotent. One thing reassures me as to our value: the boredom that afflicts us. It is the hall-mark of quality in modern men.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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Only those who want everything done for them are bored.
-Billy Graham
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America is said to have the highest per capita boredom of any spot on earth! We know that because we have the greatest number of artificial amusements of any country.
People have become so empty that they can't even entertain themselves. They have to pay other people to amuse them, to make them laugh, to try to make them feel warm and happy and comfortable for a few minutes, to try to lose that awful, frightening, hollow feeling--that terrible, dreaded feeling of being lost and alone.
-Billy Graham
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Too many church services start at eleven sharp and end at twelve dull.
-Vance Havner
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I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom.
-Heinrich Heine
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To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.
-Heraclitus
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There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society's ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In most all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers and support among the bored than among the exploited and oppressed. To a deliberate fomenter of mass upheavals, the report that people are bored stiff should be at least as encouraging as that they are suffering from intolerable economic or political abuses.
When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored. The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom. People who are not conscious of their individual separatedness, as is the case with those who are members or a compact tribe, church, party, etcetera, are not accessible to boredom. The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation or when he is wholly engrossed in the struggle for existence. Pleasure-chasing and dissipation are ineffective palliatives. Where people live autonomous lives and are not badly off, yet are without abilities or opportunities for creative work or useful action, there is no telling to what desperate and fantastic shifts they might resort in order to give meaning and purpose to their lives.
-Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (Part II - The Potential Converts; ch.10)
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If you're bored with life -- you don't get up every morning with a burning desire to do things -- you don't have enough goals.
-Lou Holtz
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Boring people are a reflection of boring people.
-Doug Horton
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Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their clich?s.
-Eugene Ionesco
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Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.
-Samuel Johnson
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Surely a long life must be somewhat tedious, since we are forced to call in so many trifling things to help rid us of our time, which will never return.
-Samuel Johnson
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Boredom is the root of all evil--the despairing refusal to be oneself.
-S
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Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.
-S
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I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.
-S
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The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.
-Henry Kissinger
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Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.
-Louis Kronenberger
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The wise person often shuns society for fear of being bored.
-Jean De La Bruyere
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The devil's name is dullness.
-General Robert E. Lee
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His shortcoming is his long staying.
-Lewis L. Lewisohn
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Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.
-Don Marquis
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The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean -- when boredom seems the very stuff of life.
-Henry Miller
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Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius, and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.
-Marilyn Monroe
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The most terrible thing about materialism, even more terrible than its proneness to violence, is its boredom, from which sex, alcohol, drugs, all devices for putting out the accusing light of reason and suppressing the unrealizable aspirations of love, offer a prospect of deliverance.
-Malcolm Muggeridge
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Against boredom the gods themselves fight in vain.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. -- A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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You'll find boredom where there is an absence of a good idea.
-Earl Nightingale
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They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.
-Dorothy Parker
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The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
-Ellen Parr
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Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.
-Blaise Pascal
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And 'tis remarkable that they talk most who have the least to say.
-Matthew Prior
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Banality is a terribly likely consequence of the underused of a good mind. That is why in particular it is a female affliction.
-Cynthia Propper-Seton
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Unless one is taught what to do with success after getting it, achievement of it must inevitably leave him prey to boredom.
-Bertrand Russell
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Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
-Bertrand Russell
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Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored.
-George Sanders
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It is the sin that believes in nothing,
cares for nothing,
seeks to know nothing,
interferes with nothing,
enjoys nothing,
hates nothing,
finds purpose in nothing,
lives for nothing,
and remains alive
because there is nothing for which it will die.
-Dorothy L. Sayers, On Boredom
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People of Wealth and the so called upper class suffer the most from boredom.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, action nor utterance, nor the power of speech, to stir men's blood. I only speak right on. I tell you that which you yourselves do know.
-William Shakespeare
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Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.
-Susan Sontag
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The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
-Saul Steinberg
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A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.
-Bert Leston Taylor
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Somebody's boring me. I think it's me.
-Dylan Thomas
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Boredom: the desire for desires.
-Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1877
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Boredom is a disease of the mind and psyche, an insidious disease. It not only takes the joy out of life, but the creativity as well. No one of God's children should ever be bored with life.
-Source Unknown
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A bore is a man who has nothing to say and says it anyway.
-Source Unknown
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Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.
-Source Unknown
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He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.
-Source Unknown
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All kinds are good except the kind that bores you.
-Voltaire (Fran
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When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
-Virginia Woolf
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Books about Boredom
